A Grim Friday

Two affecting episodes from the Johnstown Flood of 1889, in which a dam failure sent almost 15 million cubic meters of water down the Little Conemaugh river of western Pennsylvania:

Six-year-old Gertrude Quinn Slattery was riding a wet, muddy mattress through the floodwaters when a man leapt from a passing roof and struggled across to her. “I put both arms around his neck and held on to him like grim death.” They approached a white building from which two men were extending poles from an upper window to rescue victims floating by.

I was too far out for the poles, so the men called:

‘Throw that baby over here to us.’

My hero said: ‘Do you think you can catch her?’

They said: ‘We can try.’

So Maxwell McAchren threw me across the water (some say twenty feet, others fifteen. I could never find out, so I leave it to your imagination. It was considered a great feat in the town, I know.)

Anna Fenn Maxwell’s husband was washed away from a neighbor’s house moments before the flood struck the Fenn home.

I had the baby in my arms and the other children climbed on the lounge and table. The water rose and floated us until our heads nearly touched the ceiling. I held the baby as long as I could and then had to let her drop into the water. George had grasped the curtain pole and was holding on. Something crashed against the house, broke a hole in the wall land a lot of bricks struck my boy on the head. The blood gushed from his face, he loosed his hold and sank out of sight. Oh it was too terrible!

My brave Bismark went next. Anna, her father’s pet, was near enough to kiss me before she slipped under the water. It was dark and the house was tossing every way. The air was stifling, and I could not tell just the moment the rest of the children had to give up and drown. My oldest boy, John Fulton, kept his head above the water as long as he was able. At last he said: ‘Mother, you always said Jesus would help. Will he help us now?’ What could I do but answer that Jesus would be with him, whether in this world or the brighter one beyond the skies? He thought we might get out into the open air. We could not force a way through the wall of the ceiling, and the poor boy ceased to struggle. What I suffered, with the bodies of my seven children floating around me in the gloom, can never be told.

She gave birth to a baby girl a few weeks later, but the child did not survive.

From the flood museum website and the National Park Service.

| History

Reflections

http://www.sxc.hu/photo/698003

Aphorisms of German physicist Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799):

  • “Passionate ambition and suspicion I have invariably found to go together.”
  • “It is in most cases more difficult to make intelligent people believe that you are what you are not, than really to become what you would appear to be.”
  • “True, unaffected distrust of human power in general is the surest sign of mental ability.”
  • “I am convinced that we not only love ourselves in others, but hate ourselves in others too.”
  • “Where moderation is a fault indifference is a crime.”
  • “I suppose there never was a man of any great mark who was not slandered; or hardly any blackguard who never directed a slander against some man of merit.”
  • “Mankind loves company, even if it is no more than that of a burning candle.”
  • “It is a fact that there are numbers of people who read merely that they need not think.”
  • “With most people unbelief in one thing is founded upon blind belief in another.”
  • “What is very rare seldom remains long unexplained. What is inexplicable is usually no longer rare, and has perhaps never been so.”
  • “The commonest opinions and the things that everybody takes for granted often the most deserve examination.”
  • “That in advancing years we should grow incapable of learning has some connection with age’s intolerance of being ordered about, and a very close connection, too.”
  • “I have looked through the list of illnesses, and did not find cares or sad thoughts mentioned among them. That is a mistake, surely.”
  • “Saints in stone have done more in the world than living ones.”

“Has anyone, I wonder, ever dreamt of odours, without an external cause to give rise to the impression? — dreamt, for instance, of the smell of roses, when there was no rose or rosewater in the vicinity. With music this is certainly the case, and with light too; but feelings of pain in a dream usually have some external cause. As regards odours I am uncertain.”

| Quotations

“Man and Bird”

A Man with a Shotgun said to a Bird:

‘It is all nonsense, you know, about shooting being a cruel sport. I put my skill against your cunning — that is all there is of it. It is a fair game.’

‘True,’ said the Bird, ‘but I don’t wish to play.’

‘Why not?’ inquired the Man with a Shotgun.

‘The game,’ the Bird replied, ‘is fair as you say; the chances are about even; but consider the stake. I am in it for you, but what is there in it for me?’

Not being prepared with an answer to the question, the Man with a Shotgun sagaciously removed the propounder.

— Ambrose Bierce, Fantastic Fables, 1899

| Literature

Betrothed Numbers

Two numbers are said to be betrothed if the sum of the proper divisors of each number is 1 more than the value of the other. For example:

The proper divisors of 48 are 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, and 24. 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 6 + 8 + 12 + 16 + 24 = 76 = 75 + 1.

The proper divisors of 75 are 1, 3, 5, 15, and 25. 1 + 3 + 5 + 15 + 25 = 49 = 48 + 1.

Interestingly, in all such pairs discovered so far, one number is odd and the other even. Is this always the case? That’s an open question.

| Science & Math

Constraint

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animaux_sauvages_-_ll._de_Jean_Matet_-_btv1b10573583s_(11_of_12).jpg

Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.

— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908

| Art · Literature · Quotations

A 3×3 Panmagic Square

sallows 3x3 panmagic square

From Lee Sallows:

Numerical panmagic squares of 3×3 being impossible, the above square is in fact the first known order-3 panmagic square, a boast it can enjoy until the day that someone comes up with an improved solution. Such as one using all nine connected pieces, say.

Or not, perhaps? For the square above has a further property that other panmagic squares may not possess. Choose any three of the four corner pieces. There are four possibilities: aci, cig, agi and acg. Whatever your choice, the three pieces selected will tile the target.

Click for key to figure.

(Thanks, Lee!)

| Science & Math

A Crowded Verse

The names of 13 Jane Austen characters are hidden in the following lines as anagrams of complete consecutive words. For example, “was ill” yields WALLIS. (The names to be found are women’s first names and men’s surnames, as in Austen.) In most cases the anagrams are hidden in two words, but twice they’re in three, once in four, and once in a single word. What are they?

The other day when I was ill
And not a soul I knew came nigh,
Jane Austen was my daily fare —
I rather liked to be laid by.
Each line or page enthralls me quite,
I there can let no man deride;
I may be ill as a wight can be,
But, Jane with me, am satisfied.
In bed my ease is nil, yet I’ll
Be lying therein at any rate
Content. With Jane to chortle at
How can I rail at Fate?

Click for Answer
| Language · Literature · Poems · Puzzles

Comparative Biology

https://books.google.com/books?id=JDglAAAAMAAJ

The Antelope and Cantelope
Lie side by side upon the slope,
And careless persons might, I fear,
Mistake the melon for the deer.
If you will tap the Cantelope, reposing on the ground,
It does not move, but just emits a melon-choly sound;
But should you try, however, to apply a stethoscope,
And attempt this auscultation on the antlered Antelope,
And should see an imitation of a very rapid flight,
And should say, “It is the Antelope!” I think you would be right.

From Animal Analogues (1908), by Robert W. Wood, author of How to Tell the Birds From the Flowers.

| Poems